How is your poor knees and wrists, and all your rheumatical fastenings and hinges, and Dorothy's intérieur? I hope she is not tyrannizing over you with unnecessary questions and inquiries, which merely serve to trammel your free-will, by asking you where you have been walking, or if it rained while you were out.
I send you a kiss, which I beg you will give each other for me, or otherwise divide without quarrelling, and believe me
Very affectionately yours,
Fanny.
29, King Street.
... Oh yes, my dear Hal, I hear abundance of discussion of the present distracted aspect of public affairs, abroad and at home; but for the most part the opinions that I hear, and the counsels that are suggested to meet the evils of the times, seem to me as much indications of the faithlessness and folly of men, as the great movements of nations are of the faithfulness and wisdom of God.
Still, when I hear clever, practical politicians talk, I always listen with keen interest; for the details in which they seem to me too much absorbed, are a corrective to my generalizing tendency on all such subjects.
Moral principles are the true political laws (mere abstract truisms, as they are held, and accordingly overlooked, by working statesmen) by which the social world is kept in cohesion, just as the physical world is kept in equilibrium by the attracting and repelling forces that control its elements.
You ask me how many letters I am in your debt. When I shall have finished this, only one. I have worked very hard this past week to keep your claims down, but have only just now got my head above water with you.
There was nothing to like at Lynn. The weather was gloomy and cold, and I was only there two days. There seemed to be a good many curious remains of antiquity in and about the town—old churches, houses, gateways, and porches—but I had no leisure to look at these, and indeed the weather was almost too severe to admit of standing about sight-seeing, even under the warmest zeal for instruction.